Salesforce.com Acquisition of GoInstant a Perfect Fit

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July 16, 2012

In the customer service and support center world, first contact resolution is a critical metric that organizations not only track, but consistently strive to improve. In fact, research indicates that a 1% improvement in first contact resolution represents an average savings of $276,000 to an organization.

The recent acquisition of co-browsing innovator GoInstant is another example of salesforce.com leading the service industry by providing tools that contact center agents need to effectively meet customer needs and solve problems. GoInstant defines co-browsing as allowing "two or more people to browse the web together in a real-time interactive session. All participants that join a co-browsing can click, scroll, type and browse at the same time. Co-browsing does not require any downloads or plugins to work. All users need is a web browser. A co-browse session can be used to co-browse any website for customer support, sales, e-commerce, training and more.”

The expected integration of this functionality into the Service Cloud will greatly improve the rate of first contact resolution in current and future Salesforce-enabled contact centers. With this technology, contact center agents will be able to find issues and fix problems, faster. The sheer simplicity of GoInstant makes it such a powerful tool. With no file to download or install, the customer is more likely to interact with the agent, and the agent has a much a quicker connection to share information with the customer in real time. GoInstant also has the powerful advantage to work with tablets and across platforms.

Industry estimates show that eService (web, digital, and social communications) is expected to grow by 53% in the next year. Adding co-browsing capabilities to salesforce.com’s Service Cloud is a perfect fit, at the perfect time.

In fact, this acquisition reaffirms Gartner’s 2009 prediction that by 2012, integrating web interactions into the contact center would be critical to the ongoing modernization of CRM contact centers. The purchase price, rumored to be more than $70 Million, is a strong validation of the value that this functionality will bring to the service agent.